1) Official results will be out at midnight. In past years, leaked results have proven correct. I will wager that these are as well.

2) It is nice to see Williams at #1. Whatever complaints you may have about the methodology behind the ranking, there is no doubt that being #1 has a non-trivial impact on applications and yield, especially for international students. Williams should continue to, within reason, game the system by, for example, capping class sections at the magic cut-offs that US News uses.

3) The future looks good. Although the competition is tough, our most serious competitor is Amherst and they will face real headwinds given their financial constraints. Their endowment is in more trouble than ours. Their increase in enrollment will hurt the student:faculty ratio. These ranks are based on data from before the financial crash, so the Williams advantage over Amherst will only continue. Don’t be surprised if/when Amherst falls behind Swarthmore in a year or two. I also suspect that Middlebury’s recent (and deserved) rise may be in danger.

Welleseley is, in many ways, a very interesting competitor. But that is a post for another day.

4) It seems like a new feature is an explicit ranking of the quality of undergraduate teaching. Here are the top 10.

It will be interesting to read about the methodology behind this result. Also, the peer assessments: “Williams is 4.7, Amherst is 4.6, Swarthmore and Wellesley are 4.5, Middleburry and Bowdoin are 4.3, Pomona, Carleton, Davidson and a few others are 4.2. Haverford and Claremont McKenna are 4.0.”

21 Responses to “We’re #1 in US News”

That’s true, and Clemson’s provost, Dori Helms, rates 29 “national universities” as better than or equal to the “strong” mark (4 on a 5-point scale) she gave to Clemson in 2008.

But the university’s president, James F. Barker, took a very different approach in his peer assessments. Barker, too, rated his institution as “strong” — but he gave no other university in the country that high a mark, handing out 18 “good”s (3’s), 94 “adequate”s (2’s), 126 “marginal”s, and 21 “don’t know”s in the 2009 ranking. Because U.S. News’s “national universities” category includes not only well-regarded public institutions such as the Universities of California at Berkeley, Michigan, and North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but also private universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, Barker has rated his institution more highly than all of those.

In an interview Monday, he defended his approach. “The request from U.S. News is to measure the academic quality of undergraduate programs,” Barker said. “It did not say research programs, it did not say prestige. It did not say size of endowments, or anything other than undergraduate education. And I took that charge seriously, measuring what I would think would be the full package of the undergraduate experience,” including faculty-student ratio, relationships between faculty and students in and out of class … do they spend time having lunch together.

“I believe that Clemson does that better than anyone,” he said. “That’s why my ranking for Clemson is where it is. You’ll notice I did not give anyone a 5, because I did not believe any of us had reached that level…. I’m a hard grader.”

A lot of this is premature since (a) the rankings aren’t official and (b) we don’t know the details, but a few thoughts:

(1) I disagree with your bleak assessment of Amherst’s rankings prospects. Just like Williams got an aberrantly low peer assessment last year, it seems like the same fate befell Amherst this year, and that is likely to correct itself. Second, student-faculty ratio may not change for awhile — the rankings are a year behind to begin with, and Amherst’s student body expansion won’t truly be felt until and few years have passes and they have four full larger classes, so it could be years before any actual affect on that figure. And by then, USNews may have changed its criteria. Third, the financial resources ranking is not likely to change, as Amherst isn’t cutting faculty salaries and that is what USNews measures, I believe, not endowment-per-student or debt. Fourth, next year’s rankings will reflect the huge drop in applications Williams received for the class of 2013 (Amherst had virtually no drop); admission percentage if a very small part of the rankings, but W/A are traditionally so close that small differences can be dispositive. W/A/S are usually so far ahead of their competitors that the odds of any of them ever falling below 3, or at the very worst, 4, are small and would take a MUCH more dramatic change in circumstances than the factors you are talking about, which for the most part don’t even factor into the rankings calculus.

(2) Did the start of Williams’ run at number one (recall, before this six year stretch of first places finishes, it hadn’t been ranked first for nearly a decade) coincide with the start of Ephblog? I’m just sayin’ :) …

(3) Pomona really gets screwed by these rankings. Its peer assessment is WAY below what it should be, which is almost certainly what keeps it out of its deserved place in the top four.

(4) I think we’ll probably see Swarthmore finish in first place at some point fairly. Its admissions numbers are very strong because of the small size of its entering class, its intense / intellectual rep, and arguably, a bigger emphasis on quantifiable credentials — no football team, etc. Unlike W/A/M it has not expanded the size of its incoming classes at all, so that could help in the financial resources / class size metrics. Plus at some point USNews will want to mix things up a LITTLE to keep reader interest. I bet Swarthmore will finish first within the next 2-3 years.

(5) I’d be surprised if no one has written a thesis on these rankings, impact on applications, and so on, but if not, I have to agree with you on that one, it would be an easy way to generate a widely-read paper.

Morty started on July 1, 2000. He was (in)famous for doing things that would increase the rank. The example cited to me was limiting class sizes to 19 because US News cared about the percentage of classes with 19 or fewer students.

What happened to Amherst to take them from 100 last year to 96 this year? Their acceptance rate went down 3%, their SATs went up (if I recall)…is it because their PA went from 4.7 to 4.6?
I believe last year Amherst PA was 4.8, Williams 4.7
This year, Ephblog told Haverford to rate Amherst 1.5/5.0, dragged down the average to 4.6. Coupled with the financial calamity going on at Amherst, it will be a matter of time before Amherst and Haverford sit on the same perch.

There seems to be one poster (based on appearances, affiliated with Amherst) who is not a big fan of this site, and apparently believes that the occasional comparative discussion of Amherst’s finances indicates some sort of Ephblog conspiracy to bring Amherst down.

I saw a copy of the rankings. Amherst actually is substantially behind Williams (100 vs. 96). The rankings, bizarrely, have Amherst at ninth in selectivity, Haverford at second. Williams is fifth. Why? USNews disproportionately weights the percentage of matriculants in the top ten percent. This is silly because (a) lots of schools don’t report class rank, (b) for the top schools, they could easily enroll 100 percent of the class from the top ten percent and the few that are not tend to be admitted for reasons not captured by numeric indices, and (c) there is a radical difference between say, the 80th percentile at Stuyvesant and the 80th at almost any other school, so this punishes colleges who enroll more kids from more competitive high schools. Haverford ranks so highly on this measure because of a very high percentage of students from the top ten percent. This I’d imagine is fairly easy to game — if Amherst found a way to report a lower percentage of the non-top-ten percent kids (Williams seems, for example, to have fewer kids reporting class rank than Amherst), it could rise way up in selectivity — it has the lowest admissions percentage and the same SAT’s as Williams, so I imagine it could easily rise to around 4th in selectivity.

Neither Amherst nor Williams will likely be able to top Mudd, Pomona, or Swarthmore though: all have absolutely killer numeric credentials. Even that, of course, doesn’t really capture selectivity all that well … Amherst and Williams place more emphasis on athletic recruiting and racial and economic diversity than virtually all of their peers (with a few exceptions, like Midd for athletics or Swarthmore for diversity). Haverford is certainly not more selective than W/A, not even close. Even Harvey Mudd is not really comparable – if you have killer numbers and nothing else, you are far more likely to get into Mudd than W/A. Of course, if you are a great soccer player, Mudd won’t care if you don’t have an 800 math SAT.

The other area Amherst really lags behind Williams is more meaningful: faculty resources. Amherst has marginally bigger class sizes and a lower faculty-student ratio (8:1 at Amherst, 7:1 at Williams). This doesn’t reflect the fact that Amherst is expanding its student body (Williams is as well, but only marginally), so this is the one area where Williams may actually expand its edge.

There is, by the way, a financial resources category, but that doesn’t measure endowment. It measures average resources expended per student (which, obviously, is usually tied to endowment — or at least it better be). To the extent some schools are making deeper cuts to their budgets than others, that will, I imagine, change this ranking in future years. Williams ranked a few spots over Amherst on this metric if memory serves.

One other ranking of note. In the “best value” category, Williams ranked first, Amherst second (seems to be a combo of academic quality, percent of kids on financial aid, and average total discount from sticker price for those who are on financial aid).

Amherst and Williams both also ranked near the top in terms of economic and racial diversity rankings (thought neither was at the very top). Amherst had a slight edge in economic diversity, Williams had a slight edge in racial diversity, but both were in roughly the same ballpark.

US News also surveyed high school guidance counselors from top high school and had them rank the education at liberal arts schools. Williams tied for first with the Naval Academy, followed by Harvey Mudd, West Point, and Wellesley. Swarthmore and Amherst were part of a nine-way tie for sixth.

It’s nice to see Williams in first place in the annual US News survey. I agree with much of what is written above but think that the comments about testing need contextualizing. I think that Williams or Amherst could easily increase their average test scores. My sense is that the Williams admissions office has a good sense of when it is “worth it” to admit a student with more modest test scores but extremely strong academic potential. I also think that the Williams admissions office is less awed by extraordinary testing. It’s factor in the selection process but not decisive in the way it might be elsewhere. Also, schools have different philosophies of testing. Harvey Mudd, for example, is a liberal arts college blending studies in science and engineering. High testing may be critical for academic success at HM.

Williams: 10 times (counting this year)Amherst: 10 timesSwarthmore: 6 times

The current formula, with its “projected graduation rate” takes Swarthmore out of the running. It is penalized for being a difficult school (you have to have a C average to graduate, D’s don’t count) and “only” having a 92% graduation rate. It is then penalized a second time for having very high SAT scores which means a “projected” graduation rate of 95% and thus an “underperforming” penalty.

It’s the old Caltech penalty — USNEWS finally started manually adjusting Caltech’s score when the President of Stanford wrote an infamous public letter to USNEWS asking if CalTech would be a better school if it replaced engineering with basketweaving and gave everyone automatic As.

Williams had a long stretch at #3 from ’97 thru ’02 when Amherst and Swarthmore traded the top spot back and forth. USNEWS changed the ranking formula in ’03, adding the “projected graduation” rate and Williams nailed down the #1 spot. Morty also did a nice job gaming the rankings with the 2-student tutorials. Each class of 10 counts as five classes, but two is just enough to avoid the 1 on 1 cutoff for counting classes.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how you draw any ranking distinction whatsoever among Pomona, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Williams. It would be a lot simpler to just count per student endowment 50% and SAT scores 50% and then group five schools together at each tier. I would never say that any one of those four schools is “better” than the others — only that they are different and will appeal to students with different priorities. For example, an Art History buff would be attracted to Williams. An engineering geek would not. Someone who wants to duck all science and math courses would prefer Amherst and hate Swarthmore.

The reasons for Swarthmore’s “low” graduate rate are not clear. It’s worth noting that the main difference between Swarthmore and the other liberal arts schools is the presence of an engineering program. The academic difficulty of the top few colleges doesn’t vary much, though students at Swarthmore may face or feel more self-imposed pressure.

The comments about Pomona are interesting. It is often not “grouped” with Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore. I wonder how much of this perception (and academic prestige) is due to differences in academic quality versus location, history, age, size, and consortial attachment. Pomona is still relatively small, compared to other LA schools, particularly Williams and Wellesley. This may have some effect. I do think that Pomona enjoys much greater visibility today than it did even twenty or thirty years ago. It’s also important to note that Pomona’s stellar admissions statistics reflect a more recent trend. It’s acceptance rate was double what it is today, in the 80s or 90s.

In terms of overall strength, I’d still put Williams and Amherst ahead of Pomona (and the rest of the pack).

I don’t think it’s fair to say that Swarthmore is being penalized becuase it’s “hard.” I don’t think any of us have any data that shows that Swarthmore is harder than Williams or Amherst (or Pomona). In fact, Swarthmore’s ungraded first semester (year?) is a pretty big grade boost that rarely gets talked about. Take away my first semester and my overall GPA jumps about .05…take away my first year and it’s closer to .1 (I doubt I am in any way exceptional in this). While we can’t know exactly what influences Swarthmore’s graduation rate, I think it’s pretty fair to say that the number of people who actually fail out of Swarthmore are few and far between (and rather, the graduation rate at Swarthmore–as at Williams and Amherst–reflects people dropping out or transferring for reasons usually not strictly academic).

Of course, if you want to do the manual count you can try the chronicle of higher education, where a few years ago all the college rankings through the years were listed. Unfortunately, the link now seems dead: